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Topic: Brit Spags! So Jim fixed it... (Read 20461 times)

The latest is that Savile was banned from participating in 'Children In Need' events. Also we're seeing a wave of "Well...we didn't know what he was up to specifically but we did think he was weird and that was enough for us."

As for the military thing, I've had it explained to me that you 'respect and serve' the position if not the person. The king/queen might be a total jackass but you respect them being the monarch. Serve the office, not the personality that holds it.

Yeah, except legally speaking the Prime Minister is the commander of the armed forces. Not the Crown. Regardless of which inbred, chinless wonder is wearing the magic gold hat, they shouldn't be doing anything for them. If the Queen, or Prince, or some minor Earl wants someone whacked or some journos roughed up, they should have to pay Blackwater to do it, like everyone else.

And yeah, though to be fair, I think the BBC Governor in question has a point. What was he meant to do, mount a police investigation all on his own? He negated the possibility the man could do damage in a situation under BBC control. While I think the BBC has a lot to answer for, not launching a criminal investigation into Savile is not one of them. But everyone will beat up on the BBC because, unlike the Met, the BBC don't fight back.

Yeah, except legally speaking the Prime Minister is the commander of the armed forces. Not the Crown. Regardless of which inbred, chinless wonder is wearing the magic gold hat, they shouldn't be doing anything for them. If the Queen, or Prince, or some minor Earl wants someone whacked or some journos roughed up, they should have to pay Blackwater to do it, like everyone else.

And yeah, though to be fair, I think the BBC Governor in question has a point. What was he meant to do, mount a police investigation all on his own? He negated the possibility the man could do damage in a situation under BBC control. While I think the BBC has a lot to answer for, not launching a criminal investigation into Savile is not one of them. But everyone will beat up on the BBC because, unlike the Met, the BBC don't fight back.

True legally speaking though, I think culturally it might not be how people think. The Armed Forces swear an oath to 'queen & country' and all branches are prefixed with the word 'Royal'. Of all the British service men I knew, I never got the impression that they viewed the Prime Minister as their 'boss' even though he/she was actually shot caller.

As for Savile, when I was kid I thought he was eccentric but didn't get completely creeped out until I saw the Louis Theroux documentary. He just screamed squickiness and his 'I hate children' thing smacked of protesting too much.

As for the BBC - as much as it has its problems, trust me you do not want American tv.

We shouldn't confuse soldiers with symbolism. It just makes them act like idiots (see: all of human history). Of course, we shouldn't confuse people with symbolism, but that's another argument for another day.

The trick with Icke is sorting his beliefs from carefully sourced and actually existing crimes. He has a tendency to talk, quite sensibly, about documented child abuse at a boarding school and then (somehow) mention blithely that Savile supplied children for the sexual appetite of Ted Heath (!).

I mean, for instance, the stuff he writes about Jersey and Haut de la Garenne seems fairly solid. But the conclusion that therefore the Crown is behind the abuse is...not borne out by the evidence.

This is why Icke is so damn frustrating. It's like dealing with an earnest, somewhat intelligent Christian fundamentalist. He can think and he makes references to the actually existing world...but then his beliefs kick in when triggered by certain phrases and he makes a giant leap in logic to get to the predetermined conclusion. And like a Christian blaming everything on the Devil (or Teh Gaze), Icke's theories will always return to the Royal Family, Satanism and ritual child abuse.

Scotland Yard is to examine allegations that a child sexual abuse ring was connected to a Downing Street aide.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, said on Monday the claims would be treated seriously.

Last week the Labour MP Tom Watson used parliamentary privilege to make the allegations. It is understood they relate to a previous prime ministerial aide and not to anyone who has recently served in Downing Street.

Hogan-Howe said a senior officer would look at the claims and that police were in contact with Watson to see if he could provide detectives with more details.

He said they would ask the Labour MP this week "what his sources are and if they are prepared to talk to us" as the police assess the strength of the allegations.

Last week Watson told MPs that a police file relating to Peter Righton, who was convicted in 1992 of importing child abuse images from the Netherlands, needed to be re-examined.

"The evidence file used to convict Peter Righton, if it still exists, contains clear intelligence of a widespread paedophile ring," Watson said during prime minister's questions. "One of its members boasts of his links to a senior aide of a former prime minister, who says he could smuggle indecent images of children from abroad.

"The leads were not followed up, but if the files still exist, I want to ensure that the Metropolitan police secure the evidence, re-examine it and investigate clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to parliament and No 10."

It came as another woman claimed Jimmy Savile abused her on a cruise as a 16-year-old when he promised her an autograph if she came to his cabin.

Sue Southgate was with her friend in his room when he took off his trousers in front of them on the P&O ship SS Canberra, and then pulled her onto his bed for a 'quick cuddle'.

This was despite her friend having a camera - he was 51 at the time.

'At one point he slipped out of his pants and started rubbing himself up against me. I could feel that he was excited,' she told The Sun.

'He grasped me very tightly in his arms and told me to do the same to him.

'He said,"This is a special move that will help you stop the boys getting away".'

Mrs Southgate, now 51, spoke out days after it was revealed that he was later asked to leave the liner because he targeted a 14-year-old.

She added that she was shocked and ran away because she had innocently believed he was the 'harmless' man that people loved on TV.

Instead, she said, she knew if she hadn't fled she would have been forced to have sex with him.

The captain, who asked not to be named said of his decision to remove Savile: 'The more I quizzed him, the more convinced I became that he was lying.

'He was a shifty sort of chap whose eyes darted all over the place.

'The parents, who were not travelling first class, were very decent, ordinary people who were completely scandalised by Savile’s unwanted attention to their daughter. I told him he disgusted me and I wanted him off my ship when we reached Gibraltar.

'I detailed an officer to make sure he remained in his cabin until we reached the Rock.

'He was to take all his meals in his cabin and was not allowed to leave it under any circumstances short of shipwreck.'

There was always an odd edge to Jim’ll Fix It. At one level it was a power fantasy. The kiddies would write in with their outré yearnings. Jimmy, sat on his big red throne, casually dispensing the relevant favours. Then a medal would appear - as if by magic – from the depths of his thrones, and solemnly draped around the neck of the enthralled youth, while the parents, having been made to look thoroughly inadequate as providers in contrast to the magical powers of Sir Jimmy and his crack team of BBC researcher-gnomes, hung around grinning uneasily and shifting from foot to foot.

Jimmy Savile was one of Britain's biggest stars during the 1960s and 1970s - and, allegedly, one of its worst sexual predators. He started out as a dance hall DJ, then in the early 1960s he hosted the music programme Top of the Pops and later "Jim'll Fix It," a TV show in which he made young viewers' wishes come true. But Broadmoor staff considered him a psychopath.

"I'd long considered him, as did my colleagues did, as a man with a severe personality disorder and a liking for children," Richard Harrison, a psychiatric nurse at Broadmoor for 30 years during Savile's tenure told Channel 4 News.

Talk about the entertainer being a paedophile was common among staff and paedophile patients - who gravitated toward him - staff said. But Jimmy Savile lived in an era of social transformation. He was not charged or put on trial during his lifetime and died a year ago, two days short of his 85th birthday.

"I'd say he was a psychopath," said Bob Allen, a staff nurse at the time. "A lot of the staff said he should be behind bars. We used to laugh about it in those days."

Mr Allen described one evening when he saw the BBC entertainer in a car with a young girl who appeared to be 14 or 15 years old. Savile and the girl went into the flat the star had been given to use at Broadmoor. As Mr Allen walked away, the lights in the flat dimmed but nobody came out. He said he reported it to his supervisor, who he believes did refer the matter up, but was told the following day that "no one appears to be interested."

Doctors and managers at Stoke Mandeville hospital were afraid to challenge Jimmy Savile over the free access he enjoyed to wards, out of fear that he would take his fundraising millions elsewhere, a former director of nursing has said, as fresh claims emerged of abuse at the hospital and elsewhere.

Christine McFarlane, former director of nursing and patient care at the Buckinghamshire hospital where Savile volunteered for many years, said the TV star "basically … had the freedom to walk wherever he wanted" and maintained a powerful position thanks to "subtle bullying" of hospital managers.

It also emerged on Wednesday night that Savile's will executor and trustee, NatWest bank, has frozen his £4.3m estate. "Given the claims raised, distribution of the estate has been put on hold," the bank said. The freeze is because of expected legal claims for damages from his alleged victims.

In an interview with ITV news, McFarlane said managers "didn't fight that hard" to challenge Savile. "There was a fine balance … to reach in not upsetting Jimmy."

Medical staff's gratitude for his fundraising efforts had given him a great deal of power within the hospital, she said. "Along with the power, people were afraid of Jimmy stopping raising money for the hospital. There was a fear of him taking something away. He argued that it was his and not theirs."

One of the qualities that made the journey from radio to television was ‘personality’. Suddenly, you had these human beings who were ultra-everything: they were funnier and quicker and smarter than you – and, once on television, they were prettier, too. At the BBC these people became like gods. Even the weird ones. Even the ones whom everybody could tell were deranged. They had personality and that was the gold standard. Soon enough the notion of ‘men being men’ was extended, institutionally, into that’s just ‘Frankie being Frankie’ or ‘Jimmy being Jimmy’. We never asked whether a certain derangement was a crucial part of their talent.

And so you open Pandora’s box to find the seedy ingredients of British populism. It’s not just names, or performers and acts, it’s an ethos. Why is British light entertainment so often based on the sexualisation of people too young to cope? And why is it that we have a press so keen to feed off it? Is it to cover the fact, via some kind of willed outrage, that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements? Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked by journalists cynically feeding the ravenous appetites of three million people who love that stuff, and that’s just the ones who actually bought the News of the World. When Leveson’s findings are duly buried, will we realise that it was the nation’s populist appetites that were on trial all along?

We’re not allowed to say it. Because we love our tots. Or, should I say: WE LOVE OUR TOTS? We know we do because the Mirror tells us we do, but would you please get out of the way because you’re blocking my view of another 14-year-old crying her eyes out on The X-Factor as a bunch of adults shatter her dreams. Savile went to work in light entertainment and thrived there: of course he did, because those places were custom-built for men who wanted to dandle dreaming kids on their knees. If you grew up during ‘the golden era of British television’, the 1970s, when light entertainment was tapping deep into the national unconscious, particularly the more perverted parts, you got used to grown-up men like Rod Hull clowning around on stage with a girl like Lena Zavaroni. You got used to Hughie Green holding the little girl’s hand and asking her if she wanted an ice-cream. Far from wanting an ice-cream, the little girl was starving herself to death while helpfully glazing over for the camera and throwing out her hands and singing ‘Mama, He’s Making Eyes at Me’. She was 13.

There’s something creepy about British light entertainment and there always has been. Joe Orton meets the Marquis de Sade at the end of the pier, with a few Union Jacks fluttering in the stink and a mother-in-law tied in bunting to a ducking-stool. Those of us who grew up on it liked its oddness without quite understanding how creepy it was. I mean, Benny Hill? And then we wake up one day, in 2012, and wonder why so many of them turned out to be deviants and weirdos. Our papers explode in outrage and we put on our Crucible expressions before setting off to the graveyard to take down the celebrity graves and break them up for landfill. Of course. Graffiti the plaques and take down the statues, because the joy of execration must match the original sin, when we made heroes out of these damaged and damaging ‘entertainers’. We suddenly wish them to have been normal, when all we ever ask of our celebrities is that they be much more fucked up than we are. And what do we do now? Do we burn the commemorative programmes, scratch their names from the national memory?

The public made Jimmy Savile. It loved him. It knighted him. The Prince of Wales accorded him special rights and the authorities at Broadmoor gave him his own set of keys. A whole entertainment structure was built to house him and make him feel secure. That’s no one’s fault: entertainment, like literature, thrives on weirdos, and Savile entered a culture made not only to tolerate his oddness but to find it refreshing. We can’t say so. We can’t know how to admit it because we don’t know who we are. ‘This is the worst crisis I can remember in my nearly fifty years at the BBC,’ John Simpson said on Panorama. ‘It’s off the scale of everybody’s belief system,’ said the DJ Paul Gambaccini.

But it is our belief system. And now it is part of the same system to blame Savile. He’s dead, anyway. Let’s blame him for all the things he obviously was, and blame him for a host of other things we don’t understand, such as how we love freaks and how we select and protect people who are ‘eccentric’ in order to feed our need for disorder. We’ll blame him for that too and say we never knew there would be any victims, when, in fact, we depend on there being victims. Savile just wouldn’t have been worth so much to us without his capacity to hurt. He was loved for being so rich and so generous and for loving his mother, the Duchess. And no one said, not out loud: ‘What’s wrong with that man? Why is he going on like that? What is he up to?’ He was an entertainer and that’s thought to be special. A more honest society brings its victims to the Colosseum and cheers. We agreed to find it OK when our most famous comedians were clearly not OK. When Benny Hill’s mother died, in 1976, he kept her house in Southampton as a shrine, just as Savile kept his mother’s clothes, and it might have been weird but it was also the kind of celebrity eccentricity we had come to expect.

Day by day over the past month details have emerged about the shelving of the Newsnight investigation into Savile. Girls from Duncroft children’s home had given evidence: some of them were 14 when Savile began coercing them into giving him blow-jobs. They felt it would be ‘an honour’ to be in the company of someone so famous. He promised them visits to the BBC studios and one of them says she saw Gary Glitter having sex with another girl who was also from Duncroft in a BBC dressing-room. ‘Did Duncroft, a well-equipped approved school for “intelligent emotionally disturbed girls” in leafy Surrey, really require the patronage of “Uncle” Jimmy Savile?’.

Cameron is warning people to not use this as a witch-hunt against Teh Gaze.

Which is a good warning, but I hadn't actually seen any signs of that. Obviously, some MPs are in the closet, or had past "homosexual experiences" at Eton and Cambridge and as a junior Cabinet Minister or whatever, but I think so long as under 16s were not involved, only a few eyebrows will be raised, and mostly at the hypocritical political positions these people may hold.

Why did ‘we the public’ admire a blatantly bad man? You only needed to look twice at his clothes, his glasses, his conjuror’s apparatus of decoys and diversions, his bling and his shell-suits and cultivated white-blond hair to sense he was repellent. Imagine getting onto a bus filled with Jims grinning with his arrogance and self-aggrandisement.

It was thanks to a form of celebrity that shares and rejoices in the whiff of wickedness that surrounds misogyny. The cult (and love) of chauvinist celebrity forgives misdemeanours ahead of time. It encourages men especially to project longings to be outside the law onto the figure of fame. The media may provide the cult’s priests, but the congregation is compliant and provides the energy. Today celebrities seem to build entire reputations on ‘getting away with it’ as ‘we the public’ continue to collude in a worship of strong and powerful men who break the rules.

Vance, a former athlete, hung about hospitals and toured towns in a show called Vance’s Visits – similar to the Savile’s Travels radio show.

Val, 57, said: “People often asked me where I had got the inspiration for the character. They never guessed it was Savile. For a start, Jacko is handsome and charming. I assume Savile didn’t recognise himself in that description.”

Val, from Fife, encountered Savile as a young reporter in 1977. She said: “He was a deeply unpleasant man. He was all smiles and laughter for the audience but as soon as we were alone, he was different. Savile was very much in the front of my mind when I was creating Jacko.”

There was a showbusiness personality brave enough to voice his concerns about Jimmy Savile. He’s the comedian they won’t let on television.

Jerry Sadowitz is not what you would call a family entertainer. Some revile him, most comics admire him. A few, such as Frankie Boyle and Ricky Gervais, have taken the germ of his act and watered it down for mass consumption. They sell out arenas pretending to shock; Sadowitz, the real deal, exists in relative obscurity.

Sadowitz is also one of the finest sleight-of-hand magicians in the world and his 2011 tour carried the banner ‘Comedian, Magician, Psychopath’. His shows remain the most uncomfortable night out in modern comedy. Few brave a seat in the front row. And, 25 years ago, this is what he had to say about Savile.

‘There have been serious allegations of child abuse in Cleveland. To my mind there is only one way to find out whether this is true or not and that’s to . . . CALL IN JIMMY SAVILE! You can’t afford to f*** about! Bring in an expert! Am I right? A friend of mine reckons Jimmy Savile is a paedophile. Rubbish — he’s a child-bender! That’s why he does all the f****** charity work: it’s to gain public sympathy for when his f****** case comes up.’

Quote

Obviously, Sadowitz wasn’t making jokes on the back of painstaking research into Savile’s private life. One presumes he had heard the rumours and was bold enough to put them out there. The point is, what about the rest of them?

If Sadowitz, a fringe comic with no connections to TV or radio at the time, had heard enough to joke about Savile in 1987, it is fair to presume his more famous contemporaries knew, too. This would include people who have done some serious moralising in the media of late.

Wow...Jerry Sadowitz. Now there's a name I've not heard in a very long time. I also didn't know he was a stage magician either!

From what I've read/heard about the Savile debacle, I didn't get a sense there was anti-gay sentiment involved at least, not as far as JS is concerned because it seems that he targeted girls. (Or was he an equal opportunity abuser?)

I'm fairly sure Cameron was being sincere...but then, if he was, wouldn't have the Cabinet Office Behavioural Team warned him that linking paedophilia and homosexuality, if only to deny the connection, would in fact perversely reinfornce the linkage?

Of course, I am assuming all Cameron's public appearances are carefully scripted, because I'm fairly sure the Operating Thetans that control him would not be able to cope with the complexities of an unscripted reality.

I'm fairly sure Cameron was being sincere...but then, if he was, wouldn't have the Cabinet Office Behavioural Team warned him that linking paedophilia and homosexuality, if only to deny the connection, would in fact perversely reinfornce the linkage?

Of course, I am assuming all Cameron's public appearances are carefully scripted, because I'm fairly sure the Operating Thetans that control him would not be able to cope with the complexities of an unscripted reality.

Ahh...this is the same disease that Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly & co are suffering from.

It is true though that there can be a tendency for people to link Homosexuality & Paedohillia. There's some very weird, dark, psychological nuance in that.